Break an arm to pat yourself on the back

[thyme4change]

Last night my husband was reading some financial news on the internet (not exactly sure what he was reading) and he said "We refinanced at the exact right time because rates are back up now. Good Job."

I find myself saying "It is good to be lucky" a lot on these types of things. I'm happy we locked in a low rate and didn't lengthen our term - even if Phil thinks I'm wrong. I was following rates, and I knew they were low - but anything could have happened to make that not be the best move.

What financial moves did you at least half-way luck into, but now you take the credit for being smart?

[Plain Old Petunia]

I am still jealous of those with under 4% mortgages!

When I decided to let now ex-h keep our marital home, we ordered an appraisal. It was August of 2006, the very peak of the housing bubble. I can't take any "smart" credit though, it was pure dumb luck.

[Deleted]

We scored a 4.75% 30 year fix no points back in 2003. Hasn't made sense to refi.
Bought a house in the SF Bay Area in 1996. Still worth over double what we paid for.

Do I also have to account for the bad decisions?

[thyme4change]

Nope - this is the brag thread!

[MN-Investor]

Within our IRAs we buy individual stocks. Of course we take credit for every stock which has gone up and conveniently discount every stock which has gone down (Best Buy will come back up eventually, right? ).

I quit working in '99. Accepted wisdom is to move your 401(k) into an IRA so you have total control over where you can put your money. I really didn't know what to do, so I just left my money in the 401(k). I had a chunk in company stock. Since '99, the DOW has gone up 14%. My stock is up more than 600%! I always believed in the company and in its stock, and I will take credit for keeping the money in the stock, but it was more of a passive decision than an active decision.

[haapai]

I do the opposite. I initially chalk it up to smarts and only later acknowledge that luck was involved. The stories get a lot less flattering and a lot less coherent once I acknowledge that luck or timing was involved.

There are a lot more such moves than I care to admit. Most of them involve some form of refinancing.

[MN-Investor]

"Everything I ever did right was due to my great intelligence. Everything I ever did wrong was due to misfortuneate events or circumstances!"

[busymom]

Best thing we ever did was purchase the home we presently live in. The housing market was moving up, & if we could've finished construction 4-6 months earlier, probably would've saved only another $2000 or so. Then the housing prices went wayyyyyy up, and even 'tho they've dropped down again, our house is still worth more than we paid for it. So thankful NOT having an upside down mortgage. Now when we finish paying off some old medical debt, our next goal is to finish paying off the mortgage.

[whoisjohngalt]

Making a profit on my first rehab. I got VERY lucky bc I had no clue what I was doing, but when I tell the story it was all "great calculations and forthright"

Lena

[midjd]

While I was working as a contractor for my current employer in 2009, I applied for and was offered a job with another agency - OK salary, full state benefits, pension, etc. However, during the interview I realized that if I accepted that job, the next X years of my life would be completely miserable. That job interview was the first time I really grasped the concept of "bad vibes"... I swear, they were seeping out of the walls.

Even though I had no permanency at my contract gig and no real other prospects if it ended (this was in the 2009 job market for brand-new attorneys), I genuinely enjoyed it and knew I'd hate myself for giving it up for a "real" job that would make me miserable... so against all good advice, I turned the job offer down. This was on a Friday. The following Monday, my boss called me into his office and asked me if I'd like to go full-time (for appx. 30% more pay than I was offered at the other job).

I admit that I was very, very, very lucky in this situation. Things could have gone very wrong after I turned that first job down.

[thyme4change]

midwestern - congrats on that. I did something similiar. I turned down a job that I probably, on paper, should have taken. A week later I got a $10k raise, and 6 months later all the people I hated at that job had quit and I got promoted, along with another raise.

So, so glad I didn't take that job.

[souldoubt]

Leaving my previous job back in the end of 2006. I had been out of school about 4-5 months and was working at a non profit company. There were some awesome people that worked there but the company had a lot of problems, we had to take paycuts across the board some time back, the commute was about 30 miles each way but there was a lot of traffic (75 minutes to get home) and every day when I had to get up for work I was just hating life because I was so stressed out.

Put my resume together, started sending it out and met with a few recruiters just to go through that process. Got contacted by one recruiter that I never met with who told me about a position she was trying to fill. Ended up sending her my resume, had a phone interview with someone at the company and two follow up in person interviews. Got offered the job and the salary increase was about 40% and the job was about 8-10 miles away from where I lived and I could avoid free ways.

Gave my 2 weeks notice and the CEO at the old company pulled me in and told me they'd be able to slightly beat when I was getting offered from the new company. I ended up politely declining because it wasn't just about the money but other factors that were weighing me down. Over 4 years later I'm still with the same company, my salary has doubled, they've paid for my certifications and study materials and they've been able to deal with the economy much better than the other company has. I consider myself very lucky to work with the company I do now which is honestly many times better than the previous company for a variety of reasons.

[Gardening Grandma]

What financial moves did you at least half-way luck into, but now you take the credit for being smart?

Sold our old home in July, 2005 at a VERY good price. At the same time, signed a contract to build the current home. Katrina hit in August and lumber prices went up, but our price was locked in. That was dumb luck. What was smart (imho) was taking all of the equity in the old house and putting into the new one ($150K) so that our new mortgage is very low (bal of $129K @4.375%). New house has since been appraised @ $440K.

[Agatha]

After I sold my old house I didn't quite have enough to pay off the new one. I checked out CD rates on bankrate.com and found out my bank had the highest 5yr rate at 5%. Groaned, wanting more (naturally) but went ahead I got one. Three days later the bottom fell out and I was doing the happy dance! ;D

In less than two years I will pay off the mortgage with some to spare!

Dumb luck? Partially perhaps . . . but then again I made sure I bought a house which not only pleased me but one I could afford, seriously below what the bank wanted to lend me.

[sil]

I switched jobs in 2008 and was in process of moving all my retirement savings from my old 401k into an IRA when the market tanked.

Biggest stroke of dumb luck is that the rollover took forever....almost a month! So not only did I miss the initial market earthquake, I missed the following several weeks of aftershocks

[swamp]

Feb 2, 2011 12:22:44 GMT -5 thyme4change said:

What financial moves did you at least half-way luck into, but now you take the credit for being smart?

I bought Lowe's stock a few years ago, and I also picked up some Amex, Pepsi, and a few others that are just jammin'!

[The J]

I grabbed a bunch of BP when it was in the mid-30s.

[Deleted]

DH and I married in 2003 and moved to a LCOL area. We sold my house in Bergen County, NJ when we moved and I put the $200K equity that I didn't need into mutual funds. I could have paid cash for the new house, but with an under 5% fixed-rate mortgage chose not to. DH's house sold a year later- $100K more into mutual funds. Those were very good years to put $$ into the market and watch them grow. We'd both been through times when we couldn't save as much as we wanted, and this was a real boost to our retirement savings. And yes, we did lose a lot on paper in 2008, but it's pretty much recovered.

[NomoreDramaQ1015]

Locking in my SL rate at 4.8%. I just happened to graduate and be eligable for consolidation right before the rates jumped to 6.8%.

[Deleted]

We bought our first house well before we got married with 0% down solely because we wanted a yard for our dog. It was dumb luck, because we hadn't put much thought into it and it could have turned out badly. We had been dating for something like 15 months.

Anyway that was right before the housing boom started. It gained 20% equity before it was even finished being built. We were able to sell it a couple of years later and put a good down payment on our current house. So looking back we could have made a slightly better decision, but we could have done much worse.

[oreo]

I can add my lazy story. My job was outsourced in Dec 2007. I moved my 401K out of the company into another company. I wasn't sure what to do with the money so I bought some cds (at the time I think the rates were around 4%). The place where I moved the money wanted me to pay a financial adviser to invest the money properly. I didn't feel good about paying someone else to potentially lose my money. Shortly after, the market tanked and a lot of people lost like 40% of their money and I didn't lose anything. Just dumb luck that I was laid off at the right time to not lose any money.

[Urban Chicago]

We bought a condo, got really sick of it, and bought a house without selling the condo.

After several misadventures with renters, we finally sold the place in 2008. We totally lucked out in that we didn't need to bring cash to the closing. The other people who still live in that condo are basically stuck there for years.

We're just happy we didn't lose our shirts!

[stillontheroad]

The bad news is that my wife has big private student loans. The good news is that back in 2008, right before private consolidation loans disappeared, she consolidated them at a much lower interest rate. Prior to the consolidation, she was paying about $600/month just to cover the interest, and the loans averaged about 11% (ouch!); now, paying $550/month has us on track to pay them off in a total of 10 years (about 7.5 to go) and her loan is 4.05% variable. Comparing the rates isn't exactly apples to apples, since the rate on her original loans would have gone down somewhat since then, but they'd be averaging at least 8% even with the low rates now.

This is a smaller thing, but I'll take the opportunity to pat myself on the back for resisting the impulse to buy a new car recently. In November my car was on its last legs (I posted about it at the old YM) and I started looking for another one. I didn't want to spend much on a used car and the cars I was seeing in my price range didn't look great, and I started thinking about maybe just buying a new one (it would have been a new Toyota Yaris for only $15-16k, but still more than I should really spend right now). In the meantime, I kept driving my car and keeping my eyes open. I ended up buying a 2000 Corolla from a co-worker for $3,000 cash and I'm so glad I did. The car should last at least another 5 years (though I'm sure I'll have to spend some money to keep it running, of course) and I love it. It's the newest/best condition car I've ever owned, so as funny as it sounds to say this about a 10-year-old car, it feels pretty darn close to a new car to me.